Rapid Fire Reviews

Ever feel like what you’re aspiring towards amounts to little more than practiced futility? If so then maybe you understand why I’ve been gone for so long. If not, what does it matter? I’d rather not recap the last little while of my life. That’s not why I’ve sat down to write today.

Instead, I want to give you a little recap of what I’ve been playing and burn through what I’m calling ‘Rapid Fire Reviews’. I’ll list the name of the game, give a one word rating, then further expound upon that one word for those of you who don’t just skim through content and actually bother to read.

I got a PS4 a couple months ago and have been burning through the backlog of titles I hadn’t been able to touch due to my lack of a gaming PC. So, without further ado…

Nope, I’m not even going to try to be remotely impartial about this. I’m a massive Metal Gear fan. It goes all the way back to the single digits of my childhood, and the more I think about this game the more I lean towards calling it an utter abomination of a title.

I’ll admit the open world was a nice breath of fresh air for a few missions before it became a rancid monotonous repetitive scourge that made me long for the linear games of yesteryear. The entire motherbase system is only around to sell consumers MB Coins, making the retrieval of men and materials meaningless filler meant only to soak up your time.

Most egregious of all is the fever dreamed excuse of a story that provides little-to-no real substance to the Metal Gear narrative and poorly retreads all of the plot points of the first few games – from a Sniper Wolf wanna-be to the sudden bloody hallway reveal from MGS1. And SPOILER ALERT: You don’t even play as Big Boss or one of his clones! Its meaningless drivel and I still wish Snake had just shot himself at the end of MGS 4.

The Division – Good

I’m honestly not sure how the hell this game kept my attention. Its main plot is predictably basic and I normally find bullet spongy games boring after a while, but the side characters kept me engaged and the game didn’t overstay its welcome. In the end it felt like a well thought-out game through-and-through, executed just right.

All I can speak on is the single player experience. I didn’t bother getting into the multiplayer because I knew it wouldn’t appeal to me. For less than $20 I was more than satisfied with the single player experience. I’ll remember it fondly and never touch the game again.

Warframe – Unbelievably Addictive

This game soaked up a lot of hours of my life in the span of a few weeks. It’s VERY improved from what it was back in beta – which is the last time I picked it up. Murdering hordes of enemies with a frame you enjoy never seems to get old and I love how you can trade platinum (Warframe’s premium currency) to anyone, making it possible to play the game entirely for free and still be able to obtain anything and everything.

It’s freemium done right, with regular content updates that aren’t too far behind PC. Warframe is easily the best free-to-play mmo currently offered on the PS4 in my opinion.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Game of the Half Decade Material

This is easily the best game of the Witcher series by a landslide. The combat is brilliantly crafted to be both easy to use and strategically focused, the narrative and subplots will cause dozens of hours of your life to pass away happily in mere minutes, and graphics never cease to be impressive even on the PS4.

I binged the crap out of this game like I hadn’t done in years. My only knock against it would be that the last 20 hours of the game didn’t need to happen. They unnecessarily stretch out an already incredibly long game, but it’s still fantastic from start to finish.

But you already knew all of that, didn’t you?

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch – What a Console Pokemon Game Should Be

Actually, a console Pokemon game inspired by Ni no Kuni would probably still be worse just because it wouldn’t have as fun of a story. Yes, the story is heavily predictable and child-like, but it’s a lot of fun from beginning to end with great English voice actors – a rarity for JRPGs.

The sequel is coming out soon and I can’t wait to play it after finally getting to experience this great game. I just hope they do something about the god awful AI and make your companions actually have some sense this time around.

By the way, PlayStation Now works wonderfully if you have a 200 MB/s connection. I can’t really speak on the service otherwise.

Final Fantasy XIV– Currently Addicted

It’d been over two-and-a-half years since I last played FF14. My issue years ago was a lack of content and a bleak outlook of things to come due to the role system. My fears of the role system holding back content seem to have been valid, but it’s still an incredibly fun game even if every job within each role does exactly the same thing.

I play on Exodus, recently acquired a medium house in the Mists, primarily play an i256 SCH and am still playing on a daily basis. FF14 certainly isn’t for everyone – especially considering the monthly subscription fee – but I love it nonetheless.

DmC Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition – A Fun Experience

I’m not a massive DmC fan. In fact, I’ve never played any of the previous DmC games for longer than 15 minutes. But this game grabbed my interest from start to finish and was fun the whole way through.

The game hasn’t really aged very well but if you can look past the graphics – and the SSS rating system, for those of you like me who abhor such things – there’s a fun story to enjoy for 6 – 8 hours.

If you take to the comments, please keep in mind I’m only talking about the game as a standalone entity and not part of the series because I haven’t played the previous titles.

That’s It For Now

I’m thinking about getting back into writing regular gaming content again, just to do so for the hell of it, but I’m not going to make any promises. If there’s something in particular you’d like me to delve into please comment below.